Month: November 2017

Company profile vendor Pitchbook added 171,000 European company profiles along with financial data and M&A transaction details to their public and private company dataset. The new profiles cover France, UK, Germany, Benelux, Ireland, Sweden and Norway. Pitchbook also backfilled 35,000 European companies with financial data.

“Our customers require a holistic view into global financial market activity to make informed business decisions, which is the key driver behind PitchBook’s aggressive push to increase coverage of Europe’s financial ecosystem,” said Doug Trafelet, Managing Director at PitchBook. “The new companies and financials included in this dataset expansion provides unmatched visibility into company health and industry fluctuations, which simply cannot be found elsewhere. Continuing to add and refine our coverage of the European market will remain a key priority in 2018 and beyond, especially as PitchBook asserts its presence in region, both in terms of data collection and corporate footprint.”

Pitchbook has over 2,000 clients who “use PitchBook regularly to follow and analyze the flow of capital across the entire private and public markets.” The firm is a subsidiary of Morningstar and has over 600 employees.

The firm did not disclose whether they directly gathered the European private company data or licensed it from a third party. However, as the expanded country coverage matches CreditSafe’s recent expansion, it is likely that CreditSafe is providing the company financials.

Pitchbook also recently added a Chrome Browser extension which allows subscribers to right-click on a company to view a company profile.

Data automation vendor Openprise announced support for the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which goes into effect on May 25th. The new Openprise Data Orchestration Platform capabilities provide “visibility, control, and access management inside and outside of a company, without the added complexity of traditional compliance solutions.”

The GDPR specific functionality “controls the flow of EU data out of your company” via “fine-grained data filters and permission roles,” and flags leads and contacts which are subject to the GDPR even if the records lack country flags. The firm performs checks based upon emails, IP addresses, phone numbers, and non-standardized country fields. Both standard and custom fields in sales and marketing automation platforms are GDPR validated. Openprise maintains an audit trail and logs records which have been processed by partners.

The firm noted a Catch-22 in GDPR regulations. Enriching records that lack country designators may require enrichment from non-compliant datasets, violating the law. By utilizing data from within the record (e.g. domain, phone numbers), Openprise avoids violating the law in order to support the law.

“The vast majority of US-based companies are woefully unprepared for GDPR, and this new set of regulations has teeth. We’ve heard from our customers that they want a central control point to help maintain compliance with GDPR. Openprise’s position in the MarTech stack as the conductor that manages the movement and processing of data across systems puts it in a unique position to serve as this control point.”

Openprise CEO Ed King

The GDPR is broadly written to cover data held by non-EU companies, even those without operations or sales staff within the EU. Penalties can be quite high, reaching up to 4% of revenue or €20 million, whichever is greater.

“What’s so critical about GDPR is that it affects companies everywhere in the world, whether they have a presence in the EU or not, and unlike many other regulations, this one has teeth,” says Allen Pogorzelski, vice president of marketing at Openprise. “If you’ve got EU citizen data in your databases, you’re subject to GDPR regulations. U.S. companies that ignore these regulations do so at their own peril.”

This summer, Openprise launched a Data Marketplace to assist with ingesting and normalizing third-party B2B and B2C data. Amongst the platforms supported are Salesforce, Marketo, Eloqua, and Pardot. The Data Marketplace, part of the Openprise Data Orchestration platform, includes built-in rules to ensure data are properly onboarded. B2B Partners include Zoominfo, InsideView, Orb Intelligence, Synthio, Salesgenie, and Dun & Bradstreet.

Sales Acceleration vendor SalesLoft has a unique business development promotion opportunity next Monday morning in Atlanta. They are offering a Mimosas and Implosions promo for folks who want to watch the Georgia Dome implosion from their 22nd floor outdoor patio.

They are opening their office to customers, prospects, job candidates, and partners. So if you are in the Atlanta area and have a relationship with SalesLoft, it sounds like a great way to get to know them better.

New features include DotAlign integration, favorite role filtering, and saved articles.

Sales intelligence vendor RelPro continues to gain market traction in its second year with 2017 revenues projected at $1.5 million. The firm has grown to fifteen headcount. Growth has been assisted by a mid-90% renewal rate.

According to CEO Martin Wise, the firm launched RelPro in early 2016 but needed some time to round out rough edges and determine positioning and vertical fit. They are on track, however, to grow revenue 3-4X in 2017 and now support 75 corporate clients distributed across financial services (30%), Technology (30%), B2B and Professional Services (30%), and nonprofit (10%). RelPro focuses on “helping people across the business development value chain” including sales, marketing, and account management. They are one of the few to include the analyst function amongst their user personas.

“Time is the scarcest resource for anyone involved in Business Development, whether you’re in Marketing, Sales, Account Management or Research. RelPro has always been about helping you to quickly find business decision-makers (at companies of any shape or size around the world), learn more about them and keep in touch with them. With our latest enhancements, we have taken another step forward in our mission to save clients’ time through Integrated Relationship Intelligence solutions that leverage the highest quality data available.”

RelPro CEO Martin Wise

Over the past year, the firm focused on their people concordance (150 million global business professionals), “integrated relationship intelligence,” alerts, and workflow. 2018 will shift to improved firmographics and company concordance (7M). New features include a people concordance engine, relationship mapping with BoardEx supporting top tier relationships, mobile web support, and a series of integrations.

The people concordance ties together contact profiles from multiple vendors to provide a unified informational view across web news, BoardEx, Dun & Bradstreet, Zoominfo, and DotAlign. Users can also link out to LinkedIn profiles and BoardEx organizational charts. DotAlign performs Outlook mining to identify internal connections to companies along with the number of connections to company contacts. BoardEx and DotAlign functionality require joint subscriptions.

The RelPro Chrome extension provides on demand company intelligence from websites and people intelligence from LinkedIn.

The new Chrome extension displays company information based upon a URL and executive profiles tied to LinkedIn pages. Thus, users can research LinkedIn profiles and lookup emails and direct dial phones. They can also follow contacts in RelPro from the Chrome connector and link from a LinkedIn bio to their RelPro profile. Other features include the quick identification of contacts from a pre-saved list of companies, Favorite Role filters for quickly customizing searches and company executive lists, and saved articles.

The mobile site supports responsive design, providing a form-factor specific user interface. Features include company and people searching, company and people profiles, and executive lists at companies.

Favorite Roles are keyword-based and available for list building and executive list filtering in company profiles.

Amongst the new screening filters are searching against company lists and favorite roles. The favorite roles feature is a set of stored expressions that help define specific functional categories. For example, a user can focus on demand generation marketers or individuals in specific research roles and then deploy these roles for standard prospecting or executive filtering from within a company profile. Unfortunately, RelPro does not yet offer standard taxonomic job functions and levels.

RelPro’s most sophisticated integration is with NetSuite where users can synch companies and contacts, enrich records, and review duplicates. For Salesforce, users can export leads individually or as lists. Contact and Account exports are on their roadmap along with duplicate checking logic. RelPro is also working on a Microsoft Dynamics connector.

Contact Insights exported to PDF.

Other new features include web news for company and people, saved articles, and exporting profiles as vCards or PDFs.

The 2018 roadmap focuses on additional solutions for enterprise clients including company concordance improvements and company analytics. RelPro is also looking to add corporate family trees, linkage analytics, and ABM look-a-likes.

RelPro is priced at $1,200 per user for 10 users (includes 1,000 profile views and weekly alerts on up to 30 people / companies for each user). The price per user is volume based. It is higher for smaller teams and discounts apply to larger enterprise deployments. If companies are looking for additional email alerts, they are available in packages of 50 profiles for $125 per month. A Tech Search add-on, based on HG Data tech stack intelligence, is extra. The firm also offers Data Services.

One of the key themes of Dreamforce 2017 was the ability of companies to customize the branding and content within Salesforce clouds via “clicks, not code.”

The theme of this year’s Dreamforce was The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Following after revolutions driven by steam, electricity, and information technology, the fourth industrial revolution blurs the “physical and digital worlds” creating a wave of “innovation in technology” which is transforming the economy, society, and lives while creating new jobs, industries, and opportunities. This next wave is based upon intelligence. Elements include IoT, 3D printing, biotech, robotics, autonomous vehicles, nanotechnology, and quantum computing.

“This is what we call the fourth industrial revolution,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “There’s all these amazing new technologies, things like autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence and nanotechnology and mobile computing and all these things are really hitting at once. And companies are really transforming themselves and bringing all these new technologies in really to connect with their customers in new ways.”

Thus, elevators loaded with sensors now communicate back to the manufacturer and predict failures, calling for service prior to trapping people. Likewise, with tires, “if the tire blows, nobody knows; but in the future, if the [smart] tire blows, everybody knows.” So, firms like Kone (elevators) and Michelin (tires) are now B2B2C companies. In the future, if a tire is about to blow, it will communicate to the autonomous vehicle to pull over.

“Every company is getting closer to their customers. We’ve been talking about this for years. It doesn’t matter if you’re a B2B company or a B2C company, everybody’s becoming a B2B2C company.”

Salesforce and its customers are “delivering personalized one-to-one engagement at scale,” said Stephanie Buscemi, EVP of Product Marketing. This is done “declaratively, with clicks and not code.” Through the Salesforce Data Management Platform, ads are customized and delivered cross-device, allowing companies to redisplay ads or present new advertisements to their customers and prospects.

Benioff cited a series of companies providing customer service and support through Salesforce platforms including Louis Vuitton, Marriot, Coca-Cola, T-Mobile, Adidas, and Ducati Motorcycles.

“Behind all these things…behind everything is a customer. And that’s what all of us do. We are working to connect with our customers in an incredible new way.”

Simplified customization, development, and branding were emphasized during the keynote. A set of customizable products provide a “smarter, more personalized Salesforce”:

MyTrailhead service supports custom branding, content, and learning paths that allows firms to onboard and train employees on desktops and phones. Tools include quizzes, reference links, trails, and badges. Salesforce Trailhead content is also available.

MyLightning customization provides an app builder with custom pages, a Lightning theming and design system, Lightning Flow, Components, and Bolts which operate automatically on both desktops and phones. Designers will have access to dynamic components which are conditionally displayed.

MySalesforce branded “mobile apps without code” can be uploaded to the Google Play and App Store.

Based upon customer feedback, SFDC has shifted from IoT as a separate platform to an integrated feature of the CRM platform which also operates “declaratively without code.”

Benioff admitted that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is creating concerns and wondered whether it is “uniting us or dividing us. Are we more connected or somehow less connected?”

He also asked whether there is more or less equality in the World.

“There is this stress being created by this fourth industrial revolution. Yes, we have this promise of this new connected World. But what is it doing to us? And what are other actors doing around the World using these technologies? Are they changing our society? Are they changing our elections? What are they doing with this technology?”

Benioff is looking at the Trailblazers attending Dreamforce as the Customer Innovators, Technology Disruptors, and Global Shapers to ensure that the next wave is directed in a positive direction. “You have all these new tools at your fingertips, these incredible new technologies, but you are doing some amazing things in the World. You are changing your companies. You are steering this technology in the right direction. I’m so confident in who you are. I’m so confident in what’s in your hearts and where we are all going.”

Benioff noted that most technology is generally neutral in it effect upon society. It is therefore incumbent upon technologists, developers, and companies to deploy technology in a socially responsible manner which promotes greater equality. Benioff called for companies to fight for equality through equal pay, investing in schools, and opposing discriminatory laws. He also noted that it is the poor who are most hurt by environmental degradation and proudly stated, “we are a net zero cloud.”

IDC CRM Market Share (Courtesy: Salesforce 2017)

Benioff was also proud to have founded and led the leading CRM with an 18.1% market share (2016 IDC) nearly double that of Oracle (9.4%). Salesforce has the top solutions for sales (34.2%), service (33.7%), marketing (9.9%), and Platform-as-a-Service. Within the marketing cloud, Salesforce claims to offer the leading Data Management Platform and commerce Platform.

What’s more, the firm is on track to be the fastest enterprise software company to hit $12.5 billion in revenue. They hit $10 billion this year and have FY19 guidance of $12.5 billion in year 20.

One of the issues facing businesses and policymakers is an increasing skills gap. Benioff proposed MyTrailhead as one of the tools to help address the problem of workers across many industries and skill levels. MyTrailhead provides a customized, branded training platform.

TechCrunch complained that this year’s Dreamforce lacked drama as it lacked new initiatives such as the social enterprise, artificial intelligence, and IoT. “They are a company that embraces the cutting edge, but this year lacked that kind of big announcement,” complained enterprise reporter Ron Miller. To be fair, though, the company has rolled out a series of new platforms, clouds, and acquisitions over the past few years. A year with few fireworks is not necessarily a year without forward progress for Lightning, Quip, Einstein, Trailhead, and platform customization.

The conference remains a monster with 170,000 registered participants joining in San Francisco and millions of online views.

European company research firm DueDil rolled out a set of enhancements spanning list building, list analytics, compliance validation, and their API. DueDil’s products are used for sales intelligence, company research, and onboarding Know Your Client (KYC) / Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance checks.

DueDil added four Ownership search filters to assist with targeting firms with concentrated shareholdings “ripe for takeover.” The new screens include Total Shareholding Count, Individuals Count, Companies Count, and Shareholder Name.

The firm rolled out interactive lists which build upon their list capabilities. “Interactive List Reports offer a unique way of mapping whitespace and identifying new prospects, based on high-performing segments identified in a List Report,” said Product Marketing Manager Sam Hockley. “By accessing a customer list in Report view, common traits and trends are visualised, and the characteristics of quality customers can be easily identified.”

Users can now view any List Report segment in Advanced Search, surfacing the companies and related criteria. Users can drill down on segments to research anomalies or focus on size brackets within the list. The functionality can also be used to display similar companies while suppressing the original list, providing a tool for expanding the pool of ABM candidates.

Both the browser and API now support compliance checks including Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs), sanctions, fraud warnings, and adverse media. These checks are part of standard KYC / AML onboarding steps. The Adverse Media Check includes Gazette Status (receivership, shuttering a business) and County Court Judgments. Politically Exposed Persons lists identify government officials and close family members to flag funds which could be related to bribes, kickbacks, and money laundering. Sanctions lists flag individuals associated with terrorism, trafficking, and money laundering.

“Conducting these checks with DueDil allows businesses to identify any and all linkages of corporate ownership and associated individuals. As a result, when a check is run against a specific entity, that check can be extended to all of these related parties, returning any flags or sanctions across the entire group. Advanced datasets reveal the ultimate beneficial owner of a business and enable checks for PEPs and any sanctions levied against a business,” said Hockley.

DueDil performs KYC/AML checks against both businesses and individuals. People checks are performed in conjunction with Callcredit.

DueDil also recently launched API support for webform auto-population and enrichment.

@Twitter now supports 280 characters, so we can be verbose. With such limits, one could almost write an essay. Still, I would prefer that they show actual characters left than display a usage dial. It doesn’t warn you about limits until you get within 20 characters. #innovation?

Twitter had doubled its capacity to 280 character tweets noting that in countries where there is less character cramming (e.g., China, Japan, Korea), there are fewer full-length messages and a higher propensity to tweet. “Twitter is about brevity,” blogged Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen and senior software engineer, Ikuhiro Ihara. “It’s what makes it such a great way to see what’s happening. Tweets get right to the point with the information or thoughts that matter. That is something we will never change.”

“Historically, 9% of Tweets in English hit the character limit. This reflects the challenge of fitting a thought into a Tweet, often resulting in lots of time spent editing and even at times abandoning Tweets before sending. With the expanded character count, this problem was massively reduced – that number dropped to only 1% of Tweets running up against the limit.

Aliza Rosen, Twitter Product Manager

Twitter noted that during a test, the length of tweets quickly returned to its terse style, but with few tweeters bumping up against the limit. “We saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they Tweeted more easily and more often. But importantly, people Tweeted below 140 most of the time and the brevity of Twitter remained,” said Rosen.

So, I guess we’ll all be fine, but what does this mean for the Tweeter-in-Chief and posterity? Will some future historian performing data analytics pick up on the change in length?

Will Trumpish remain its own special language? Will Sad! become So Sad! And was cofeveve an acronym he can now spell out for us?